Joseph Woods of PHPCow sent us a note about SmartMarkUP, a “universal markup editor”:

SmartMarkUP is a lightweight and powerful JavaScript library that allows you to turn any textarea into a fancy markup editor. HTML, CSS, XML, Wiki syntax, BBCode or any other desired markup language can be implemented and/or adjusted to your preferences and business needs. SmartMarkUP doesn’t depend on any other JavaScript library and can be integrated with any already existing JavaScript library or code.

Although SmartMarkUP is stand-alone, they’ve created a jQuery plug-in wrapper for it. The documentation is quite extensive and includes detailed notes on how to use the editor to edit your own markup.

While the editor has buttons and such to make it easier to manipulate the markup (a la WordPress’ own code editor) the editor itself doesn’t have any kind of syntax highlighting or auto-indent / auto-complete features.

Still, it’s a pretty neat little package:

* SmartMarkUP is completely free and open source
* SmartMarkUP is a small script, compressed version weights only 10kb
* SmartMarkUP is completely skin-able you can fit it’s design with your applications easily
* SmartMarkUP can be used from any other script
* SmartMarkUP is self contained and doesn’t depend on any third party scripts. You can use it with Prototype, jQuery, Mootools or any other JavaScript libraries.
* SmartMarkUP doesn’t requires changing of already existing markup or code infrastructure.
* SmartMarkUP degrades gracefully, that means your application will continue working in browsers with disabled JavaScript.